In Confessions of Faith in Early Modern England, Brooke Conti defines confessions of faith as autobiographical passages in works of seventeenth-century religious polemic that are motivated by the authors' desire to give a public account of their beliefs to align themselves with particular religious position, party, or practice; however, the authors' complex personal and familial histories often complicate and obscure straightforward professions of belief or denominational allegiance. She identifies these particular types of confessions of faith, or self-scrutinies, as appearing only in the specific context of seventeenth-century England, “the age of oaths of allegiance and civil and religious warfare” (4). According to Conti, these confessions of faith emerge at the intersections of the genres of spiritual autobiography in the tradition of Augustine or Paul, creedal declarations of corporate identity common in the Middle Ages, and confessional “tell-all” autobiographies in modern writing.

Conti's method is comparative. She selects six authors whose confessions of faith “reflect different strategies of religious identification and different problems of self-representation—strategies and problems that change with each man's relationship to the institutional church and with the political climate in which he lived” (13). She analyzes the works of these men in chronological order, and she groups the authors in pairs to highlight similar representational dilemmas. Conti offers compelling evidence for her argument by examining little known texts of these prominent public figures and by revising interpretations of their more famous polemic.

Conti uses the lives of King James I and James II as bookends for her study. These monarchs exemplify the pressures and fluidity of religious identification at work in England. Both monarchs, like many of their subjects, were baptized into a denomination other than the one they would later claim. Consequently, they felt the need to explain publically their idiosyncratic navigation of the binary categories—Catholic or Protestant—and their unstable relations with England's institutional church.

The first section of the book examines the ways James I and John Donne responded to the Gunpowder Plot and Jacobean Oath of Allegiance in light of their Catholic heritage. Conti argues that James I struggled to remain loyal to his Catholic parents, to his Presbyterian upbringing, and to the prelatical English church in Basilikon Doron (1599), the preface to the second edition of An Apologie for the Oath of Allegiance (1609), and in numerous speeches. Highly conscious of the national significance of his religious identity, James I masterfully employs ambiguous language to present himself simultaneously as a loyal son and a loyal Protestant while warding off accusations of hypocrisy. In contrast, Donne foregrounds his conversion from Catholicism in Pseudo-Martyr (1610) and Devotions upon Emergent Occassions (1623). In these texts, he grapples with conforming to a normative, orthodox religious identity and exposes his shifting relationship to the English church. For political and professional reasons, both men must perform alignment with the state and its church, though both are reluctant to sever attachments with their families' Catholicism.

The second section of the book compares the ways John Milton and Thomas Browne reacted to the Civil War by producing “personal credos,” revealing personal and idiosyncratic approaches to religious conformity and both insisting “upon the primacy of reason and individual choice” (14). In his antiprelatical tracts of the 1640s and Defences of the 1650s, Milton struggles to discern his political, spiritual, and literary vocation and to align his ambitions with divine design. Conti suggests that the “stridency in his confessions of faith seems intended to convince himself of the truth of his literary-spiritual destiny as much as convince his readers” (80). In Religio Medici (composed ca. 1635 and revised twice before its authorized publication in 1643), Browne anxiously assesses his doctrinal orthodoxy as he ponders heterodoxies he encountered during his medical training in France, Italy, and Holland. Milton's and Browne's confessions of faith highlight the complexity and uncertainty of personal religious identity in the midst of sectarian violence.

The third section of the book highlights the ways John Bunyan and James II challenged the possibility of being a “loyal dissenter” to the English church after the Restoration. Although Grace Abounding to the Chief Sinners (1666) narrates his youthful conversion, Conti argues that incarcerated Bunyan focuses more on his concerns about the consequences of his perceived vocation to be a Nonconformist preacher; he tries to reassure himself that “he really was saved—and that his imprisonment is thus not a punishment but a test” (142). In his public writing, James II shows little anxiety about his religious identity as a Catholic convert; instead, he argues for the separability of his religion and his public role. Although perceived as threats to the Church of England, neither Bunyan nor James entirely aligned themselves with or overtly opposed the institutional church, thus demonstrating its waning popular authority in English life.

The strengths of the book are its comparative method and its emphasis on the historical contingency of the composition of the confessions of faith. While I would have appreciated more discussion about seventeenth-century confessions of faith as replacements or outgrowths of the omnipresent creedal discourse of the medieval period, Conti directs her theoretical framing to autobiography studies. She repeatedly describes confessions of faith as “forensic devices” the authors used to explore tensions between individual experience and collective identity, and she suggests that confessions of faith offer insight about the role of communal expectations in public performances of identity. Autobiography for Conti, is not so much a genre, as a device that the six highlighted authors employed to frame their public explorations and projections of their denominational and institutional allegiances to potentially critical and historically contingent audiences.